Welcome back Year 2- 07.11.25

What an amazing first week back we've had! It's been lovely to hear about your adventures over the half term.

In maths this week, you have been continuing your learning
on addition and subtraction. You explored inverse operations to
help you solve missing number problems, learning that the opposite of addition
is subtraction and vice versa. You used number lines to support your
working out and became more confident in spotting the missing number in a sum.
You also discovered how your number bonds to 10 can help you find your number
bonds to 20, making your mental maths even stronger!

In phonics, you have been continuing to recap your sound knowledge
and build upon your reading accuracy and fluency. In Steps to Read, you have
been exploring the non-fiction book The Sea Book by Charlotte Milner.
This informative book teaches us all about ocean life and the many creatures
that live beneath the waves. You have learnt lots of fascinating facts about
the features of fish, invertebrate marine animals, sharks, and whales. You also
discovered how we can help protect our oceans by reducing our use of single-use
plastics. You did an amazing job answering comprehension questions about each
part of the book, showing great understanding and curiosity throughout the
week.

In English this week, you discovered some mysterious items
on your tables — bricks, garden shears, and gardening gloves. You worked
brilliantly to predict who these items might belong to and what they could tell
us about our new story. You were then shown the first picture from the book,
which was of Grimloch Lane, and noticed that everyone in the picture looked
dull and bored. You created fantastic freeze frames to show the emotions of the
people and did some brilliant role play to bring the scene to life.

Next, you were given two more pictures and discovered that
our new story is The Night Gardener. The story tells the tale of a young
boy and a gardener who transform their gloomy town by creating magical
animal-shaped topiaries overnight, bringing colour and joy back to the people
of Grimloch Lane.

Throughout the week, you read the whole story, explored the
example text, and focused on new vocabulary from both. To finish the week, you
wrote a beautiful simile poem inspired by the front cover image, using your
imagination and descriptive language to capture the wonder of the story.

You have loved the afternoons this week as you completed
your first forest school session in Year Two. You focused on our art learning
and you collected some natural resources and created your very own natural
artwork in partners. You then went onto building dens and roasting marshmallows
on the fire. What a great time we had! In RE, you have been continuing your
learning about the Christmas story. You looked at the story of Zechariah and
Elizabeth. You retold this story in your books focusing on how Zechariah was greeted
by an angel in the temple and that he told him that Elizabeth was going to have
a baby called John and that he would prepare everyone for the birth of Jesus.
We found out that the angel took Zecariah’s voice away because he didn’t
believe but as soon as John was born his voice came back. In Geography, you
learnt what a landmark was. You explored the landmarks in our capital city London
and then you looked at the landmarks in our local area of Wybunbury. You used a
map to place where these landmarks and you labelled whether they were physical
or human features of Geography. In computing you worked hard on E safety and thought
carefully about what rules we should have when using phones and ipads. In your
second computing lesson of the week you started your new topic on digital
photography. You learnt what photography was and what sort of information
technology can take photos. You learnt how to take different photographs e.g.
selfie, something in the distance, close up, an action shot. You learnt how to
hold the iPad, how to ensure that the whole object is in the photo and how to
take the photo. You took some amazing photographs and we loved looking through
them. This week you even got a special treat and had a thrive session. In this
session, you completed different fitness tests. You also had your PE lesson
with Coach Beth. In music this week, we began our new unit Let’s Keep
Singing. We stretched our bodies and warmed up our vocals. We then listened to
a story called Little Angel Gets Her Wings. We discovered the actions in the
story were acts of kindness. We will learn songs to accompany this story and
create our own mini-performance. We can’t wait to add acting parts in too!

You have also learnt what our nativity is this week and all
of the different parts in the nativity were given out. Please work hard on
learning your lines over the next couple of weeks.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend,

Miss Haynes